While “hundreds of thousands” is really not all that much comparatively speaking, I wonder what is stopping these investors from setting up their own Mastodon instance with it? There is really not much additional benefit of investing into the organisation that the Mastodon founder established to hold the trademarks / domain and run the flagship instance.
@poVoq @Greenpepper What’s the incentive? What’s the exit strategy? What’s the expected ROI?
Exactly… to either ways to interpret your question. Although I guess you could sell or otherwise try to monetize a reasonably popular Mastodon instance if your really wanted to.
I also think a big portion of it is riding the popularity wave while you can and getting your name tossed in the bowl while it is going on is a good look.
Seems more like people trying to capitalize on the bull run before it is not as lucrative to an outside investor.
I dunno, getting control of the biggest instance that many people still treat as the default choice when joining instead of creating their own probably makes it a tiny bit easier to kickstart things. according to mastodon.social’s stats displayed on its main page, there are 192k active users which according to my math is more than 0 users on a new instance. almost two hundred thousand accounts you can datamine and eventually start displaying ads to - and probably at some point discconnect from the rest of the Fediverse and turn into its own thing, the way companies like to do when they embrace open standards. and all of this would be way easier if you owned the Mastodon trademark that most people are familiar with (and which for many people is basically the entire Fediverse, the same way how for people in some poor countries Facebook is basically the internet).
With the current growth figures a professionally run Mastodon instance with a semi competent PR campaign would easily have 200k users in a matter of a few weeks. Sure the trademarks and stuff would help a bit, but it’s not like like by investing they get full say to do whatever.
These people don’t understand the fediverse, they are about as smart as amoeba but instead of stimulus-response they operate off of investments and profit. The concept of “running an instance” is alien and a non-profit makes the opposite of sense to them.
Only until several corpos like tumblur turn a profit with the fediverse will they begin to get a clue.
Don’t do it. Mastodon (or the Dev team behind the source code), hey! snaps fingers look at me! Don’t you freaking dare!